Themes
Books About Art and Creativity
Novels and memoirs where making art, music or literature is the beating heart.
20 books · ranked
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1
The Goldfinch
When a bomb destroys the museum where he is visiting, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives but his mother does not. In the chaos, he takes a small Dutch painting — The Goldfinch — which will haunt his life for the next decade and a half, through foster care, antiques, addiction and a criminal underworld. Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on art, loss and the things we carry.
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2
The Argonauts
Part memoir, part theory, part love story — Nelson writes about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and her pregnancy, while drawing on feminist philosophy, queer theory and literary criticism. The Argonauts is a book about how language both creates and fails the experiences it tries to hold.
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3
This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff's memoir of his adolescence in 1950s America — moving with his mother from town to town, enduring a cruel stepfather named Dwight, petty criminality and an elaborate scheme to escape to a school he has no right to attend. A foundational American memoir and a study in the complicated relationship between the person you were and the writer you became.
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4
Still Life
In the Quebec village of Three Pines, a woman is found dead in the woods on the morning after Thanksgiving. Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec arrives to investigate — and finds a village of artists, eccentrics and buried secrets. Penny's debut introduced one of crime fiction's most beloved series and established Three Pines as a genuinely compelling literary setting.
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5
A Song for a New Day
In a near-future America where mass gatherings have been banned after a wave of attacks and a pandemic, a touring musician who refuses to stop performing live encounters a young scout for a tech company that has built an empire on virtual concerts. Pinsker's Nebula Award-winning novel — written before COVID-19 but eerily predictive — is about live music, isolation and what gets lost when everything moves online.
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6
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, a writer and communist living in 1950s London, keeps four notebooks — black for Africa, red for politics, yellow for her novel, blue for her ordinary life — and attempts to synthesise them into a golden notebook. Lessing's formally radical novel about female consciousness, creative block and political disillusionment was one of the most important feminist novels of the 20th century.
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7
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
A young Vietnamese-American man writes a letter to his illiterate mother — about the grandfather he never knew, the grandmother who survived the Vietnam War, his own adolescence in Hartford Connecticut, and a first love that ended in opioid overdose. Vuong's debut novel is prose as concentrated as poetry, a meditation on language, inheritance and what immigrants pass down without knowing it.
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8
Ceremony
Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran traumatised by the Second World War, returns to New Mexico and seeks healing through ceremony — the traditional Pueblo healing ritual — while navigating the destruction that the modern world has visited on his community. Silko's novel interweaves myth, poetry and prose to show the relationship between individual healing and communal survival.
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9
Verity
Struggling writer Lowen Ashby is hired to complete a bestselling thriller series after the author Verity Crawford is incapacitated. Working in the Crawford home, Lowen finds a manuscript — an apparent autobiography — that contains a confession of terrible acts. Hoover's dark thriller is about truth, gaslighting and the stories women tell themselves and each other.
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10
Malibu Rising
Four siblings — Nina, Jay, Hud and Kit Riva, children of a famous but absent surf musician — come together for the annual party at Nina's Malibu house in August 1983. As the night unfolds, Reid weaves back through the family's history to show how they got here. A novel about celebrity, abandonment and the summer a world ends.
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11
Nights at the Circus
Sophie Fevvers, a trapeze artist who claims to have been hatched from an egg and to possess actual wings, captivates American journalist Jack Walser, who follows her from London to St Petersburg to Siberia trying to determine if she is genuine. Carter's carnivalesque novel is both a riotous adventure and a feminist meditation on spectacle, self-creation and what it means for a woman to own her own myth.
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12
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
In 1930s New York, Josef Kavalier — a Czech Jewish refugee with an escape artist's training — and his cousin Sammy Clay create a superhero comic called The Escapist. Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about escape in every sense: from Prague, from poverty, from the closet, from death, and finally from the stories we tell about ourselves.
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13
My Name Is Red
In 16th-century Istanbul, an illustrator is murdered — and the miniaturists in the Sultan's atelier must discover which of their number committed the crime while navigating the debate between Eastern and Western styles of representation. Pamuk's Booker International-shortlisted novel is both a detective story and a meditation on artistic identity, tradition and the politics of seeing. He won the Nobel Prize in 2006.
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14
Leaving the Atocha Station
Adam Gordon, an American poet on a fellowship in Madrid, navigates the cultural fallout from the 2004 train bombings while maintaining an elaborate performance of emotional depth he is not sure he possesses. Lerner's debut is one of the most precise accounts of artistic imposter syndrome and the specifically contemporary problem of being unsure whether your inner life is real.
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15
The Help
Skeeter Phelan, a white aspiring writer in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, partners with two Black maids — Aibileen and Minny — to secretly publish a book of accounts from domestic workers. Stockett's debut novel was an enormous commercial success and is also one of the most debated novels about race, voice and the ethics of who tells whose story.
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16
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Music executive Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha are at the centre of a set of stories spanning decades and shifting perspectives, formal registers and even one chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation. Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks what time does to people, to music and to the stories we tell about both.
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17
1Q84
In 1984 Tokyo, a fitness instructor named Aomame and a novelist's ghostwriter named Tengo find their lives converging toward an alternate version of the world — a 1Q84 where two moons hang in the sky and mysterious forces called the Little People shape reality. Murakami's most ambitious novel since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a love story set at the intersection of cult religion, magical realism and alternate history.
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18
On Beauty
Two academic families — one liberal white British, one conservative Black American — are connected by a long professional rivalry, their children's entanglements and a painting that both men want to own. Smith's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is a deliberate retelling of E.M. Forster's Howards End set in a New England college town.
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19
Bel Canto
When terrorists seize a South American vice-president's mansion during a soprano's recital, they take dozens of hostages — and the weeks of captivity that follow become a strange, suspended world in which music, love and an unlikely community develop in the middle of a political crisis. Patchett's PEN/Faulkner winner is about beauty, connection and the life that forms in confinement.
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20
Sophie's Choice
Stingo, a young Southern writer in Brooklyn in 1947, becomes close to Sophie Zawistowski — a beautiful Polish survivor of Auschwitz — and her brilliant, tormented lover Nathan. The novel builds to Sophie's terrible secret: the choice she was forced to make in the camp. Styron's National Book Award-winning novel is about guilt, survival and the American encounter with European atrocity.